Selecting Messages

The primary commands for selecting messages in VM are n (vm-next-message) and p (vm-previous-message). These commands move forward and backward through the current folder. When they go beyond the end or beginning of the folder they wrap to the beginning and end respectively. By default these commands skip messages flagged for deletion. This behavior can be disabled by setting the value of the variable vm-skip-deleted-messages to nil. These commands can also be made to skip messages that have been read; set vm-skip-read-messages to t to do this.

The commands n and p also take prefix arguments that specify the number of messages to move forward or backward. If the magnitude of the prefix argument is greater than 1, no message skipping will be done regardless of the settings of the previously mentioned skip control variables.

The variable vm-circular-folders determines whether VM folders will be considered circular by various commands. Circular means VM will wrap from the end of the folder to the start and vice versa when moving the message pointer, deleting, undeleting or saving messages before or after the current message.

A value of t causes all VM commands to consider folders circular. A value of nil causes all of VM commands to signal an error if the start or end of the folder would have to be passed to complete the command. For movement commands, this occurs after the message pointer has been moved as far it can go. For other commands the error occurs before any part of the command has been executed, i.e. no deletions, saves, etc. will be done unless they can be done in their entirety. A value other than nil or t causes only VM's movement commands to consider folders circular. Saves, deletes and undeletes will behave as if the value is nil. The default value of vm-circular-folders is 0.

Other commands to select messages:

RET (vm-goto-message)

Go to message number n. n is the prefix argument, if provided, otherwise it is prompted for in the minibuffer.

TAB (vm-goto-message-last-seen)

Go to message last previewed or read.

N (vm-Next-message)

P (vm-Previous-message)

Go to the next (previous) message, ignoring the settings of the skip control variables.

M-n (vm-next-unread-message)

M-p (vm-previous-unread-message)

Move forward (backward) to the nearest new or unread message. If no such message exists then these commands work like n and p.

M-s (vm-isearch-forward)

This works just like Emacs' normal incremental search except that when the search ends, VM selects the message containing point. If the value of the variable vm-search-using-regexps is non-nil, a regular expression may be used instead of a fixed string for the search pattern. VM defaults to the fixed string search. See section `Incremental Search' in the GNU Emacs Manual.